Helen Gurley Brown’s Fashion Sense: the Power of Cleavage

Helen Gurley Brown’s Fashion Sense: the Power of Cleavage

Her Cosmo covers were an exacting science of bodacious hair, confident gaze, silky skin, and necklines that plunged low enough to titillate and entertain without causing too much offense. The Cosmo woman was neither raunchy nor vulgar. She was, in the parlance of the 1960s and 70s, liberated.

Her Cosmo kept an eye on Seventh Avenue, but it was never a fashion magazine. A model appeared on the cover of Cosmo as a kind of rite of passage from anonymous mannequin to individual. A young star who was ready to be perceived as a fully realized woman, as a sexual being, would sign up for her Cosmo cover. They didn’t wear the high-fashion frocks of the moment. They didn’t wear the kind of clothes meant to elicit an intellectual response. Instead, the image was one of pure visceral pleasure: a beautiful body, well displayed.

Brown didn’t concern herself with the shifting trends of the runway. She was more interested in the way fashion played out in popular culture, they way it could arouse, empower and provoke. In short, fashion was the conduit of a woman’s sexuality.

For Brown, the primary relationship that interested her was that between a man and a woman. The Cosmo girl courted the admiring masculine gaze. It didn’t matter if the man was straight or gay. And whether or not the self-declared feminists of her day, who were offended by her flirtatious gestures, chose to acknowledge it, most women take pleasure from and empowerment in a lingering glance.

For Brown, fashion was in service to pleasing men. And men liked cleavage.

“She liked clothes that were sexy, flirty, and tasteful. And she was obsessed with boobs,” remembers designer James Purcell, who dressed Brown in floral organza for the 1993 Academy Awards when her husband David Brown’s film, A Few Good Men, was nominated for best picture. “Clothes were to entice the man.”

The Cosmo girl’s heyday coincided with the rise of John T. Molloy’s working woman. The boardroom fashion guru advised women to, in essence, dress like a man in order to advance up the corporate ladder. And so, his advice gave rise to the dull navy suits and the floppy neckerchiefs standing in for the man’s four-in-hand.

Brown’s approach to fashion stood in stark contrast to that philosophy. It was far more audacious and ultimately, more connected to the reality of our culture. Her Cosmo girl wore clothes that reflected the complicated relationship between men and women—whether they were meeting in a ‘70s fern bar or a workplace cubicle. Sex appeal was as much a part of the interaction as the air they were breathing.